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ScienceWeek
SCIENCE POLICY: ON THE TEACHING OF PSEUDOSCIENCE
The following points are made by Robert S. Schwartz (New Engl. J. Med. 2005 353:1437):
1) In the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, Frank Morgan plays five roles. In one of them, he is a flimflam hawker of trivia traveling across the plains of Kansas in a horse-drawn wagon. In another, he is the wizard who, concealed by a curtain, manipulates a machine that controls all of Oz. Now, more than 65 years later, another pitchman is rolling across Kansas, but unlike Morgan's bumbling peddler of trinkets and dreams, the new one has no interest in such trifles. It is an articulate and sophisticated anti-evolution movement called "intelligent design." At its core is the idea that a supernatural being -- a hidden wizard -- has a hidden hand in shaping the living world.
2) The intelligent design movement has attracted support from US politicians at every level of government, from the Dutch minister of education, and from the Roman Catholic archbishop of Vienna, who has determined that the theory of evolution is inconsistent with the teachings of his church. In his objection to evolution, the cardinal joins Joseph Stalin, who forbade its teaching in the Soviet Union. More important than approval from high-profile national and international leaders, however, is the determination by members of public school boards in at least 20 states that intelligent design should be taught in school beginning in the ninth grade.
3) It has been 80 years since the Tennessee legislature passed the Butler Act, which made the teaching of evolution a misdemeanor, and 80 years since John Scopes, a high school science teacher and football coach, was found guilty of violating that law. In the Scopes trial, Clarence Darrow argued, "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." Darrow lost his case, and despite all the ensuing decades of science education, the movement to teach intelligent design has spread from school houses to college campuses and university postgraduate programs. The author states he fears that it will soon reach medical schools.
4) To understand why intelligent design constitutes an insidious menace to medicine, it is helpful to trace its roots. In part, it evolved from creationism, which takes the Genesis story of creation literally. Creationism has been discredited, however, by indisputable physical evidence -- carbon dating, for example. In 1987, the teaching of creationism in public schools was forbidden by the US Supreme Court (Edwards v. Aguillard). Still, a large part of the public believes in creationism and yearns for a return to God in public schools. At its root, intelligent design is a medieval theological proposition that is based on faith, not logic, and certainly not science. It is theology dressed up as science, but it cannot be easily dismissed.
New Engl. J. Med. http://www.nejm.org
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JUNK SCIENCE AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN
The following points are made by Dan Agin (citation below):
1) Darwin was aware there would be trouble, but it's doubtful he thought the trouble in America would be endless. Alexis De Tocqueville, on the other hand, writing a generation before the ORIGIN OF SPECIES, knew a few things about the American people. "In America," de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, "religion is perhaps less powerful than it has been at certain periods in the history of certain peoples, but its influence is more lasting."
2) More lasting, indeed. Nearly 150 years after the ORIGIN OF SPECIES, the conflict between science and the Bible continues to fester in America, while in Europe, the ancestral home of American religion, the scientific explanations of the history of Earth and of the evolution of life upon the planet have been generally accepted without furor, at least by the general populace. In 1996, Pope John-Paul II himself, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, finally acknowledged, "the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis."
3) An advance, perhaps, but dogma must be preserved: in the same address the Pope cautions that the idea that the mind emerges from living matter or is an epiphenomenon of matter is "incompatible with the truth about man." And then in 2005 Christoph Schoenbron, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna and the lead editor of the official 1992 catechism of the Catholic Church declared to the world that "evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not [true]", the cardinal stating: "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." This is certainly a strong statement against all of modern science, with twisted logic that calls the Church scientific and scientists ideologues.
4) So if ordinary Europeans are generally more accepting of neo-Darwinian evolution than ordinary Americans, any marriage between the Church and science is not yet in the works -- not even an announced engagement. Man's body may have evolved, but his soul is still held fast by the ecclesiastics. And neo-Darwinism, the merging of classical Darwinian evolution by natural selection with modern genetics, the cornerstone of modern biology, is summarily rejected. The Church apparently accepts evolution and the descent of man from animals but declares the process is all by design of a Creator rather than by natural selection of random variation. (The archbishop's denunciation of neo-Darwinism suggests he's unaware that the idea of natural selection of random variation is classical Darwinism.)
Adapted from: Dan Agin: JUNK SCIENCE: How Politicians, Corporations, and other Hucksters Betray Us. St. Martin's Press 2006. (in press).
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ON EVOLUTION VS. CREATIONISM
The following points are made by Stephen Jay Gould (citation below):
1) According to idealized principles of scientific discourse, the arousal of dormant issues should reflect fresh data that give renewed life to abandoned notions. Those outside the current debate may therefore be excused for suspecting that creationists have come up with something new, or that evolutionists have generated some serious internal trouble. But nothing has changed; the creationists have presented not a single new fact or argument. Darrow and Bryan were at least more entertaining than we lesser antagonists today. The rise of creationism is politics, pure and simple; it represents one issue (and by no means the major concern) of the resurgent evangelical right. Arguments that seemed kooky just a decade ago have reentered the mainstream.
2) The basic attack of modern creationists falls apart on two general counts before we even reach the supposed factual details of their assault against evolution. First, they play upon a vernacular misunderstanding of the word "theory" to convey the false impression that we evolutionists are covering up the rotten core of our edifice. Second, they misuse a popular philosophy of science to argue that they are behaving scientifically in attacking evolution. Yet the same philosophy demonstrates that their own belief is not science, and that "scientific creationism" is a meaningless and self-contradictory phrase, an example of what Orwell called "newspeak".
3) In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" -- part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus, creationists can (and do) argue: evolution is "only" a theory, and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is less than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science -- that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
4) Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. And human beings evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered.
5) Moreover, "fact" does not mean "absolute certainty". The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Adapted from: Stephen Jay Gould: HEN'S TEETH AND HORSE'S TOES: Further Reflections in Natural History. W.W. Norton 1983, p.253.
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